Everywhere I turn these days I see paeans to empathy. Books are being written about its civilizing powers — The Empathic Civilization, Empathy and Democracy, Empathy in a Global World — and conferences and websites are being devoted to the concept as well.

In his bid for the presidency, Barack Obama literally ran his campaign on the value of being emotionally open, telling Americans they had, in fact, an "empathy deficit," which he urged they rectify, first by electing him.

Empathy, of course, is the ability to experience the feelings of another person. Humans do it, so do other mammals, according to many primatologists, including Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape and The Age of Empathy.

Humankind's closest relatives, bonobo apes, like this guy, photographed near Kinshasha in the Democratic Republic of Congo, share 98.4 per cent of their genetic makeup with humans as well as, some primatologists say, many emotions. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

The latter he wrote because he was so impressed with the loving and empathic powers of bonobos and he feels that we humans have much to learn from these wild, soulful creatures.

Of course, we Canadians are empathy champs. We allow immigrants into our country, in numbers disproportionate to our population, and give refugees full legal rights even when they just appear at our doorstep.

We have so much empathy, in fact, that we don't need to be hectored about empathy deficits. We even elect prime ministers who don't bother to try to project it.

Stephen Harper, a pretty self-contained fellow, merely has to present himself at the UN (which Canadians love and Americans are deeply suspicious of) and reaffirm Canada's traditional role as good global citizen to make the case for a seat on the Security Council.

Please, is the message, we'll use it wisely and take into account the feelings and hopes of billions of people.

Take pity on empathy

Empathy is even seen as a way to manage climate change, according to certain advocates.

But as a political or civilizing tool, empathy clearly needs cultivating, judging by all the calls to arms and promptings. It can apparently fall into disrepair.

Brain scientists are currently studying our empathy nerves, our "mirror neurons," to try to determine how such an emotion works. And religious preachers and writers, such as Karen Armstrong, are always telling us to be compassionate and empathic, in an attempt to strength these particular qualities in our daily lives.

Empathy is so high on the scale of positive human attributes that mere sympathy looks condescending.

What's the difference? When you sympathize you feel "for" other people. When you empathize, you feel "with" them. It's more intense, more directly emotional.

As for pity, well, that's downright colonial, something masters do to their inferiors.

I could wax on for days about empathy, that most revolutionary emotion, as the feminist author Gloria Steinem once called it.

You see, for years I was the producer of CBC Radio's most empathic program, Tapestry, and then, for a while, worked with Peter Gzowski who could project empathy, seemingly at will, every morning into the psyches and teacups of millions of Canadians.

So was I surprised when my good friend W. told me, "I have a real problem with empathy." But it turns out he does.

One cranky Canadian

W. is a very philosophical fellow and, at times, even crankier than me.

"I think that conceptually the idea of empathy is highly problematic," he wrote to me in an e-mail. "It's not an idea, it's an intellectual prayer: Please God make it so that we feel for each other the way you feel about each and every one of us."

Empathy, according to W., takes the Golden Rule (do unto others), or the philosopher Immanual Kant's categorical imperative to treat others as ends and not means, and pumps up the emotional volume.

For W., to be told constantly to empathize is to be bullied, intellectually and emotionally. For him, when you bring empathy into the room, it stops any conversation. It's like being told to shut up and feel.

I told you W. was one cranky Canadian.

But maybe Canadians as a whole are becoming a bit less empathetic. Look at the ruckus surrounding the Tamil boat migrants who landed in Vancouver, who many people feel are either bogus refugees or queue jumpers.

And look at the reluctance of many Canadians to donate money to assist Pakistani flood victims (not knowing where their money would end up, among other reasons).

Working against empathy is the healthy reaction people have that they don't like to be made suckers — or at least to feel like suckers.

Along with our empathy neurons, we humans seem to also have an almost inbuilt sense of fairness, reflecting what some have called a natural or fundamental sense of justice.

Judicious sympathy

Indeed, there are so many claims on our empathy detectors these days that it can drive some people crazy. Just read this stream of consciousness raving on the web from a person whose skin has grown too thin. He clearly needs a retreat from his fellow human beings or a good dose of anti-empathy meds.

The empathy candidate, presidential hopeful Barack Obama comforts Alverna Gracy, a campaign worker in Charlotte,North Carolina, in November 2008, shortly after the announcement of the death of Obama's grandmother. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

For years, doctors have been told to improve their bedside manners and develop their capacity for empathy. Courses at medical schools have even been developed for this.

But one doctor, Jane Macnaughton, writing recently in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, argues that "feeling the distress of their patients" can be unhelpful even dangerous.

Plus it's not very realistic. "We cannot really feel what somebody else is feeling," she writes.

In fact, Macnaughton says a doctor who responds to a patient's distress with "I understand how you feel" is likely to be both resented by the patient and self-deceiving.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Well, maybe having a bit of an empathy deficit isn't such a bad thing. Sometimes having too much empathy can obstruct our capacity to analyze and make discerning judgments.

So let's restore judicious sympathy to its rightful place. At least, it prods people into further debate, which is not a bad thing in a democracy. Even in Canada, eh.